Elder statesman

George McGovern: Chapter 5

Oct. 21, 2012

Former Sen. George McGovern pets his Newfoundland, Ursa, in a courtyard at his official residence in Rome. McGovern was the ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture program. / Argus Leader file photo

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A bronze statue of U.S. Sen. George McGovern and his wife, Eleanor, greets visitors to the library that bears their name at Dakota Wesleyan University.

On that campus in Mitchell, McGovern received the first of his degrees, began dating the woman he would marry and taught and influenced students in the post-World War II era.

The statue, however, also pays tribute to his influence well beyond South Dakota and, in his last decades, McGovern devoted himself to giving others a better life.

During the Oct. 7, 2006, library dedication ceremony, former U.S. Sen. Tom Daschle touched on McGovern’s efforts, saying his fellow Democrat’s attention to world hunger should inspire others.

“It’s hard to think of an issue that demands greater justice than this,” Daschle said then. “And while some of us can boast about winning an election or passing a bill, how many of us can say that we fed millions of hungry people around the world?”

President Bill Clinton, who worked on McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, also spoke at the library dedication. He noted that McGovern had joined with another former senator, Republican Bob Dole of Kansas, on propose an international school lunch program. It first was funded during Clinton’s administration.

The program offered a nutritious meal and required students to attend school. In its first year, school enrollment worldwide increased by 6 million, many of them young girls who had little opportunity for education without the incentive of a free meal.

The later years of McGovern’s life focused on many things, including writing books and making frequent speaking appearances, but world hunger remained of vital importance.

In April 1998, McGovern was named U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture. The three-year appointment meant a move to Rome. That was when he and Dole worked together to persuade the Senate to support delivering more surplus food to foreign school-lunch programs.

Nutrition programs in the United States also received expanded services, including school lunch, food stamps and assistance for pregnant women and children in need.

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Clinton gave McGovern the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Honor, in August 2000. McGovern stayed at his post until September 2001 at the request of President George W. Bush’s administration.

A month later, the World Food Programme, which he had helped found 40 years earlier, appointed McGovern the first United Nations Global Ambassador on World Hunger. He served as a goodwill ambassador for more than a decade.

An area of service often overlooked, said Don Simmons, director of the McGovern Library, is the senator’s passion in ending the global AIDS crisis.

He worked closely with Donald Messer, a former DWU president and seminary president who now heads the Center for the Church and Global AIDS.

“He has seen how devastating the AIDS epidemic is in Rwanda, South Africa and Kenya, where in some villages well over half the population is affected and entire generations in Africa are being wiped out,” Simmons says. “It fits in with hunger. If people are not getting proper nutrition they can’t fight the virus.”

Messer, a native South Dakotan, first met McGovern in the early 1960s when both men were in India. McGovern felt a moral outrage that a world rich in food and medicine denied it to “the poorest of the poor,” Messer said.

McGovern’s long connection with DWU continued throughout his life. Bob Duffett, DWU’s current president, said the last 15 years of McGovern’s life were no different than the first 50 years of adulthood.

Duffett said the former senator was “engaged to the end on all the things he cared about. He was giving every ounce that he could for causes he believed in.”

In the years since 9-11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the former World War II bomber pilot and peace activist frequently was sought out for his historical understanding and his opposition to the Vietnam War, Duffett said.

“The war on terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq, a lot of people say, what should our proper response be, especially Iraq, why did we get into that war? For millions of people, it sounded like Vietnam.”

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As an author, McGovern shared his views on Social Security and higher education.

“The G.I. bill was so generous to him, he often wondered if it was good enough for World War II veterans and a boon to America, why shouldn’t everyone get it,” Duffett said. “He was always an advocate for universal health care.”

As with anyone who lives a long life, McGovern had to say goodbye to many loved ones. His beloved wife, Eleanor, was too ill to leave their Montana home to attend the October 2006 McGovern Library dedication. She died Jan. 25, 2007.

Jack Billion, a former Democratic candidate for governor, served on the DWU board of trustees. During meetings on campus, he often saw McGovern come to his library office. Never did McGovern pass by the statue of his wife without touching her cheek or resting a hand on her shoulder, Billion said.

Steven McGovern, the fourth of the couple’s five children, died July 27 of this year. Like his sister, Terry, he had struggled with alcoholism.

“It’s very difficult to lose two out of five kids, long before their time,” Duffett said.

McGovern always was active. He went skydiving on his 88th birthday; recently attended a South Dakota State Fair debate that featured grandson Matt McGovern, a candidate for the state PUC; attended a press conference announcing the renaming of the Sylvia Henkin State Theater; and appeared with the South Dakota Symphony this fall.

It would have been difficult for McGovern to give up the activities he enjoyed, Simmons said.

“He’s the consummate campaigner,” Simmons said. “He’s always on a campaign. It may not be political, but it’s for some cause or something. For him not to be able to get out and commit and campaign for hunger and whatever would be difficult.”

An article McGovern wrote, a reflection on his presidential defeat 40 years ago, appeared Sept. 28, 2012, in The Washington Post.

He described himself as “genuinely stunned” by his lopsided loss to President Richard Nixon.

“Most disappointing was that I did not carry my home state of South Dakota,” McGovern wrote. “The voters of South Dakota had known me for many years, and I thought they would have believed it to be in their interest to elect one of their own to the presidency.

“The loss is there, an old wound never fully healed. ... While it hurt to have tried for and never reached the brass ring of American politics — and I still feel the sting, even now — I never regretted the attempt.

“And at the wise old age of 90, I can say that losing the presidency was one chapter in a long, complex and richly happy life in which I learned that you can’t always control all the outcomes. But I am optimistic about the country, and I am convinced that McGovern for President 1972 helped put those ideals within sight and completion today.”